ectural monuments in a way that is totally modern in its individualized expression, not unlike the era’s action painting in the West. This exhibition of his later woodcuts will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States.

nta College of Art, South Carolina State College and Claflin College. Ellison’s colorful representations of the 1980s and 1990s in Atlanta suggest both the diversity of experience and the isolation and fragmentation associated with the changing urban landscape. His block-print technique produces figurative abstract landscapes, which are rich and visually complex in form and meaning.

ak with conventional conceptions of space and establish new ways of seeing.

The Städel Museum’s programme for 2017 kicks off with an exhibition looking at the representation of spatial concepts in drawing and printmaking. “Into the Third Dimension: Spatial Concepts on Paper from the Bauhaus to the Present” will be shown in the Exhibition Hall of the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The show examines how such things as delineation, form, and volume, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – characteristics that define space and aid orientation – are represented in drawing and printmaking, in essence on flat, two-dimensional surfaces. The exhibition takes visitors on a tour beginning with the geometric compositions created in 1923 by El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, through to examples of printmaking in contemporary conceptual art.

It encompasses works by a total of 13 artists, including Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida, Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo, James Turrell, and Michael Riedel. Lithographs depicting Constructivist perspectival representations are displayed alongside embossed prints that emerge out of two-dimensional flatness. Slits revealing imaginary spaces are juxtaposed with designs for wall pieces. Prints evoking three-dimensionality, created by figures of Minimal Art, space art, and light art, can be seen alongside chalk drawings, foldings, and collages by 20th century sculptors. The exhibition does not feature preliminary sketches or documents written in the wake of the artworks themselves. Rather, it features independent works in which artists have executed their spatial concepts within the formal parameters of techniques employed in printmaking and drawing. The exhibition brings together important sheets from the Städel Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, selected works from the Deutsche Bank Collection at the Städel Museum, long-term loans from the Commerzbank AG, and loans from a private collection.

ter knowledge of technique, allowing artists to experiment with subject matter and process more than ever before. This exhibition features works on paper by well-known artists such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, as well as those lesser known today, including Albert Besnard and Henri Guérard, and features several new acquisitions to the RISD Museum’s collection.

The exhibition is complemented by the online publication Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris, made possible by a grant from The IFPDA Foundation.

King as a statesman, general and patron far beyond the borders of his own country. Prints were especially suited to this purpose. They were easy to transport; they could be produced in great numbers; they were sold individually or sumptuously bound together, and they could unequivocally serve political aspriations. Engravings after paintings in the King’s collections, views of his palaces, and images of his military victories advanced them to highly respected prestige objects.
In 1660, Louis XIV freed engravers from the restrictions of the guild system and elevated them to the rank of free artists. In 1663 they were allowed to enter the Royal Academy, which provided standardized training and thereby ensured an extraodinarily high level of technical skills. The precision and inventiveness of engravers such as Gérard Edelinck, Robert Nanteuil, Pierre Drevet and Jean Audran, who used subtle graduated tonality, sophisticated lighting, and eleborately worked surfaces, contributed significantly to forming a French style that set the standard for later printmaking.
The engraver Anton Würth (*1957), who has explored the aesthetic quality of 17th century French engravings in depth, has been invited to make a guest contribution.

is studio in Montmartre, a Paris neighborhood known for its freedom and nonconformity, and reveled in entertainments found at hot spots like the Chat Noir, the Mirliton, and the Moulin Rouge. His record of amusements fashioned a portrait of modern life that captured the bohemian spirit of the belle époque, a time of vitality and decadence in France.

Having first experimented with lithography in 1891, Toulouse-Lautrec revolutionized the medium with ambitious work that featured fragmented forms, compressed pictorial space, dramatic scale, and vivid colors. Considering printmaking equal in importance to painting, he prepared in-depth sketches for most lithographs. He selected subjects from daily life, honed in on details for impact, heightened unique features, and celebrated performers and spectators in memorable images that define the era. He looked to the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the theatrical paintings of Edgar Degas, and the simplified, vibrant forms of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. This remarkable collection, on view for the first time in the United States, also includes examples from influential contemporaries—such as Théophile Alexandre Steinlein’s famous poster for the Chat Noir and Anquetin’s animated painting of the Mirliton—that enrich Toulouse-Lautrec’s enduring characterizations of turn-of-the-century Paris.

"The Life of Toussaint L'ouverture: Jacob Lawrence"
This exhibition features 15 rarely seen silkscreen prints created by American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917–2001) between 1986 and 1997. The series portrays the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1742–1803), the former slave turned leader of Haiti’s independence movement. L’Ouverture led the fight to liberate Saint-Domingue from French colonial rule and to emancipate the slaves during the 1791 Haitian Revolution, the first successful campaign to abolish slavery in modern history. Lawrence had explored the same subject more than 40 years earlier—when he was only 20 years old—in a series of paintings of the same title (now in the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans). The celebrated paintings, which were featured prominently at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939, laid the groundwork for Lawrence’s lifelong interest in the human quest for freedom and social justice.

While he based these later prints on the earlier 11 x 19-inch paintings, Lawrence distilled the story to 15 works from the original 41 panels and significantly expanded their scale. He worked closely with DC-based master printmaker Lou Stovall to translate the colors and fluid movement of the original tempera paint to each composition. In the print series, the narrative follows L’Ouverture from his birth to his rise as the commander of the revolutionary army to his eventual capture by Napoleon’s men. In the original painted series, Lawrence continued the story through the death of L’Ouverture as a prisoner of war in 1803, just one year before Haiti declared independence with the crowning of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

erial capabilities—to innovate in the expression of mythological, religious, social, and political ideas.

These artists, at work during the first three centuries of printmaking in Europe, included Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Canaletto, Tiepolo, and Goya. They used a range of techniques—woodcut, engraving, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and others—to explore the unfamiliar and strange. Some prints, like Dürer’s Apocalypse, gave visual form to contemporary anxieties about the end of the world. Others, such as Canaletto’s fantastic views of Venice or Piranesi’s of Rome, enhanced familiar cityscapes with caprice, heightened drama and anachronism.

Escaping the Ordinary offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the minds of these great printmakers as they eschewed everyday surroundings for exotic costumes, landscapes, and creatures.